Category: Wales

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Secondary Childhood; or, Pandas to Ponder

Wili and Wali at Penrhyn Castle

It is not dotage but a momentary state of doting. Not the reliving of one’s own youth, however romanticized, but an imagining—or experiencing—of what it means to be very young while looking at objects or confronted with performances not created with me in mind. Not reverie, in short, but empathy. That is what I call “secondary childhood”—the state of being elsewhere in time and space, being young there while being here and quite otherwise. Listening to so-called old time radio programs produced in the US, for instance, I am keenly aware that I am entering worlds once inhabited by millions of children born in a country other than my German birthplace, past generations whose reflections are lost to us and, all too frequently, even to them—worlds the passage to which might have been blocked and obscured over time, but that might nonetheless be recoverable.

This recovery effort is quite distinct from the nostalgia of which I am so wary, the attempt of forcing oneself back through that passage and, failing to do so, creating one through which one may yet squeeze wistfully into a niche of one’s own making. It is quite another thing, to me, to set out to gain access to the worlds of other people’s childhoods, to tune in with one’s child’s mind open. I try not to make assumptions about audiences and their responses; instead, I try to become that audience by permitting myself to be played with so as to figure out how a game or play works.

Penrhyn Castle

As I have had previously occasion to share after a trip to Prague, I enjoy looking at old toys. Visiting the grand and rather austere neo-Norman castle of Penrhyn last weekend, on an excursion to the north of Wales, I was surprised to find, housed in that forbidding fantasy fortress, a corner devoted to a collection of dolls. Now, it seems perverse to be so drawn to the two stuffed animals pictured above, stuffed as Penrhyn is with exquisite furniture and impressive works of art (a Rembrandt, no less). I gather it was the bathos of it, the relief after having had greatness thrust upon me to be surprised by these unassuming and, by comparison, prematurely timeworn objects.

Turns out, the twin pandas in the straw hats are Wili and Wali, marionettes who co-starred in a long-running Welsh children’s program titled Lili Lon (1959-75). Upon returning to mid-Wales, where I now live, I immediately went online in search of the two; but, aside from a history of their creators, little can be found about them. I have become so accustomed to YouTubing the past that I was surprised to find no trace of Wili and Wali. No doubt, they still dwell in the memories of thousands who shared their adventures. I was not among them; yet, as is often the case when I come across titles of lost radio programs or fragments thereof, I imagine myself enjoying what is beyond my reach . . .

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The Camera, the Coast and the Canvas: A Picturesque Incident

“Let’s go for a ride,” he said. “Where to?” I dared to ask; but there was no reply more concrete than a “Wait and see.”

The sky was clear yesterday, and the afternoon seemed right for a jaunt, a break from the radio waves in which I tend to immerse myself to the point of drowning. So, off we three went. Montague, my lover, and I. We drove down the Ceredigion coast to a secluded little seaside town called Llangrannog. We climbed down the steps to Cilborth Beach, which we had all to ourselves. My eye was drawn to the mysterious Carreg Bica, the rock you see me (and Montague) contemplating here. Legend has it that it is the tooth of a giant; it has become more scraggly through the years after a large chunk of it was claimed by the Irish sea.

What I did not know until we got to Llangrannog is that this was to be an excursion into the picturesque. We had come in search of a specific scene as shown in this painting by the Welsh artist Christopher Williams (1873–1934). And there it was, ninety years later, the same seascape, that ever changing, never changing scene. Bica’s decaying tooth excepting. The tide was right in; so we did not get to see the coastline just as it appeared to the artist back in 1917, when its a rock solidity must have been welcoming and reassuring, far removed as it stood from the all-consuming whirlpool uncertainties of the Great War, the horrors of which Williams captured in The Welsh at Mametz Wood (1918).

Now, as I learned upon our return home, that painting is to be ours; it will join a portrait by Williams’s son, Ivor (“Suffolk Farmer,” shown in this Wikipedia entry). Whatever happened to holiday snapshots? I wondered, all the while enjoying the sheer extravagance of this picturesque experience.

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Felicitous Tintinkering; or, Take Note, Mr. Spielberg

Considering that he inspired the adventures of Indiana Jones, Tintin should do well under Steven Spielberg’s direction. Little is known as yet about the project; and I wonder whether Spielberg, preparing the boy reporter for his first Hollywood outing, is paying attention to the Young Vic production of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, which I caught at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff prior to its return to London, where the production will soon reopen in the West End. What an inspired piece of pop culture this dramatization of Tintin in Tibet (1958-59) turned out to be.

I was not prepared to be charmed. I expected something along the lines of the previously reviewed Thirty-Nine Steps (which will soon open on Broadway); but, despite its wit, David Greig and Rufus Norris’s stage version was not so much tongue-in-cheek as it was true to and respectful toward its source without being slavish in its fidelity.

The psychedelic opening sequence had me worried a bit. Although entirely in keeping with Tintin in Tibet, which draws on surrealism to explore the dreams and visions of its central characters, the parading of famous Hergé figures who have no part in the story had something of a routinely choreographed theme park performance. From this costume ball, however, a number of strong characters soon emerged.

Matthew Parish was ideally cast in the title role, conveying both the vigor and vulnerability of our hero, who is driven to the point of madness and despair in his selfless yet lives-endangering quest to find and rescue a friend whom everyone assumes to have perished in a plane crash. Particularly haunting is a scene in which Tintin investigates the crash site and is faced with the ghosts of the dead passengers.

Miltos Yerolemou (previously hidden in the costume of the giant Yeti) was entirely believable as Snowy, the reporter’s four-legged companion. Their friendship, and indeed the very concept of friendship, is at the heart of Tintin in Tibet, a story with whose gentle lesson the creative team behind Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin did not try to tinker. Heartwarming and pulse-quickening, the result is energetic, charming, and altogether absorbing.

Unlike most of today’s Hollywood blockbusters, the stage play suggests as much as it shows, leaving the audience, assisted by ingenious props, to imagine themselves high in the Himalayas, a hidden lamasery, or the cave of a legendary monster. The props, in this case, are not a substitute for the imagination. They are a stimulant. Let’s hope that big screen, big budget special effects won’t do away with this give and take of make-believe . . .

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In My Library: Emlyn (1973)

Like the man in the old Schlitz commercials says, “I was curious.” So, earlier this week, I went to the local second-hand bookstore in search of George, an autobiography of actor-playwright Emlyn Williams. It had been recommended to me at the recent Fflics film festival here in Aberystwyth as the insightful source of The Corn Is Green, a play and movie about the relationship between a Welsh student and his English teacher. The shelves of Ystwyth Books (shown here in a picture I found on flickr) are well stocked with titles on Welsh history and culture.

Not that titles about Hollywood or radio are wanting. In fact, the first purchase I made in this country shortly after moving here in November 2004 was made in that very store. It was a book on radio writing that had just come out (new releases can be found downstairs). Radio writing? In 2004? There was a chance, I thought, that I might feel at home here, eventually.

Anyway, there was no sign of George. The shop’s new proprietor offered to descend into the basement to check the inventory with which he is as yet not entirely familiar. After a few minutes, he emerged with Emlyn, subtitled a “Sequel” to George. Would I want it, not having been introduced to George (Williams’s other first name)? I opened the book, and it seemed to speak to me and anticipate my doubts:

I don’t think I’ll read this—it says it’s a sequel and I didn’t read the first one so I’d feel out of it from the first page . . .

And even if you did read “the first one,” your mind needs refreshing. It is up to me to ensure that the reader need know nothing of George by supplying rapid salient information about my life up to April 1927.

An author so forthright and accommodating deserves to be given a chance, I thought. Then I read on, sensing that what I wanted to learn from and about the playwright of Night Must Fall (and He Was Born Gay) was something he might not wish to share:

Before I do so, one thing: at the moment when I embarked on the “first one” I decided I would travel no further than the age of twenty-one, feeling that while a writer’s first two decades might be of interest, the third must present a formidable task.  Can he be as honest about it?

I knew that without honesty the story would deteriorate into a parade of professional ventures interspersed with cautious anecdotes.  The alternative must be a marriage between Candour and Taste, with the continuous likelihood of one partner pushing the other out of bed; even then, it would have to be a different book.

A “different” book. That is just what I expect from a self-conscious gay Welshman with a penchant for serial killers. Will he be honest about “it”? Will he lie in bed with Candour or lie about his bedfellow with Taste? Is this autobiography apologia or play-acting, an author-actor’s chance to don masks of his own design? We think of truth as being naked; but the act of self-exposure, the dropping of guises, the whole tease of the strip itself is performance.

Now, Emlyn, subtitled A Sequel to George, is one of those memoirs whose author is kind enough to provide an index, allowing those as impatient as I am to extract from the text what interests them most without having to go to so many parties, rehearsals, and opening nights. The first thing on my mind was not the open secret of Williams’s private life, but anything relating to Night Must Fall, the thriller I had seen on stage during the centenary of Williams’s birth back in 2005.

Williams recalls how the play came about and how, during a party at the house of fellow actor-playwright Frank Vosper, he discovered that his host appeared to be writing a similar thriller, also involving the case of murderer Patrick Mahon. Vosper’s play was titled Love From a Stranger, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s story “Philomel Cottage.”

Murder must out. Must Mr. Williams?

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Du a Gwyn: Shades and Shadows of Life in Wales

Well, I am used to it. That is, I used to be. Seeing images of my surroundings on the big screen is rather a common experience if you live in the cinematographically well-mapped center of New York City. Moving from Gotham to Cymru (that is, Wales) seemed to push my life effectively off the map I had gone by in the shaping of my existence ever since I first set eyes on the Big Apple. I have been reluctant to discard the old plan in exchange for a new atlas, one that matches my present environs, one that might help me to position instead of dislocating myself. This journal has been largely a mode of escape, a vehicle of expression designed to transport me from a place in which I have not yet found a voice. Just from what am I trying to get away, though? And how much longer can I get away with using a chart of my own making, drawn, as it were, with my eyes closed to the world?

You might say that moving from and vowing never to return to what is supposedly my home (my native Germany), whether to Manhattan (where I lived for about fifteen years) or to Wales (where I have been residing nearly three years now), is a continual rehearsal of my sense of displacement as a gay person, as someone not quite at home in any society, as someone suspicious of the very concept of home. As an expatriate, I have made the experience of being born an outsider a matter of choice.

I have been reminded of my estrangement—and the unease of longing and not belonging—while attending Fflics, the aforementioned festival of classic films representing Welsh life or a Wales imagined elsewhere. How queer, for instance, to feel alienated by The Corn Is Green (1945), a Hollywood movie based on a play by gay actor-dramatist Emlyn Williams and starring gay icon Bette Davis. Here is a studio version of Wales that bears little resemblance to any Cymru past or present, a film that now strikes me as disingenuous and calculating as the strumpet portrayed by Joan Lorring.

Three years ago, I would not have been able to tell that the accents in Corn are as phony as the painted backdrops. However willing I am to suspend disbelief, I cannot go so far as to suppress my new knowledge and experience for the sake of entering into a world that commercially exploits foreignness without embracing it. Williams’s own struggle to come to terms with his marginality is deproblematized, his secret code obliterated. What remains is the missionary message that it takes someone ignorant of your origins to assist in what amounts to a purge, to prompt and prod you into becoming someone you ought to be according to superimposed standards.

An extreme form of such reconditioning is presented in The Silent Village (1943), a propagandist documentary imagining the invasion of a Welsh (and linguistically entirely non-English) community by the Nazis, whose first act is to prohibit the use of the Welsh language. Meeting with silent resistance, then active revolt, the fascist invaders effectively take the town off the map, killing its men and razing its homes in retaliation of the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi official.

It is a remarkably restrained, unsentimental and unhysterical recreation of the Lidice massacre, acted out by ordinary folk in a Welsh mining town not unlike Lidice. While the town of Cwmgiedd was being turned into a symbol, it lost none of its character during or as a result of the location shoot, the iconography of its everyday being carefully rendered. Verisimilitude turned to reality, pastness to present, when one of the Welsh villagers, a schoolboy back in 1943, spoke after the screening of the film about the town’s non-hostile takeover by the British film crew.

Utter hokum by comparison is Graham Cutts’s The Rat (1925), a pseudo-Parisian melodrama reveling in its own irrelevance. Gay Welsh matinee idol Ivor Novello plays a tormented object of heterosexual desire, an apache who comes to value the love of his gal pal over the glamorous world that enslaves him even as he seeks to conquer it. Penned by Novello himself (under the telling pseudonym “David L’Estrange”), The Rat invites decoding; but even if the code can be cracked, the film remains impersonal, sheltered as it is by its own artifice.

Rather more personally relevant to my experience is the image of the stranger in Proud Valley (1940) starring Paul Robeson as a black American introducing himself into a Welsh coal-mining community. “Why, damn and blast it,” one of the miners protests, “aren’t we all black down it that pit?”

As I learned reading Cadewch i Paul Robeson Ganu!, a fascinating account of Robeson’s ties to Wales, the actor-singer-activist found here a “cymuned o’r un anian,” a kindred community. “There is no place in the world I like more than Wales,” he once exclaimed. He expressed his solidarity with the Welsh miners, whom he first encountered and aided in 1929, singing for them (via transatlantic exchange) even when he was barred from international travel after his passport was confiscated by the US government.

It is a “kindred community” like this to which I have yet to gain access; it is this sense of being embraced and found valuable that I have yet to experience here. I realize that, for this to happen, Wales and Welsh have to become a more integral part of my existence as I am sharing it in this journal. So, after following a haunted and hunting Ivor Novello (as a suspicious foreigner and loner) into the London fog shrouding The Phantom Fiend (1932), the underappreciated talkie take on Hitchcock’s Lodger, I am discovering the actor anew in a Welsh setting established in speech and song by Cliff Gordon’s radio comedy “Choir Practice: A Storm in a Welsh Teacup” (produced in 1946) and subsequently adapted for the screen as Valley of Song (1953), another one of the films shown as part of the Fflics festival. Here, at least, the idiom rings true . . .

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“. . . till the fat lady sings”

It seems that the proverbial one who’s got more curves than the skeletons on the catwalks has not warbled her last.  No, it ain’t over yet.  According to my students, at least, whose rallying cries generated enough interest to keep my rather esoterically titled course “Writing for the Ear” alive, death warrants and prematurely issued certificates notwithstanding. The “fat lady,” of course, is the diva who gets to have the last word in opera. I don’t know where the expression originates; but it seems to be true for much of the operatic canon.  Tonight, I am going to see Mimi expire in a production of La Bohème, performed by the Mid-Wales Opera Company.

Now, I have been going to the opera since I was a teenager, even though prohibitively high prices made for long gaps in my exposure to this kind of melo-drama.  And even though a tenor numbered among my close friends in New York, Opera-going still mostly meant finding an empty space to spread my blanket on the Great Lawn whenever the New York Opera toured the parks, taking the sandwiches out of the basket, and hoping that no cellular device would go off to mar the performance as I lost myself in the night skies in search of that rare star darting its long-delayed light through the smog and light pollution of Gotham.

My tenor friend tried to convince me that opera is the highest form of dramatic storytelling; but, for the most part, I struggled to follow the plot and keep straight just who is who and doing it with whom. Last night, watching the pre-code melodrama Secrets of a Secretary, starring Claudette Colbert and Herbert Marshall, I thought what a great plot for an opera it might have made.  A woman repentant of her follies, a sinister husband, a pining lover (a nobleman, no less), and bloodstained dress.  Perhaps, I’d rather lose track of the plot than the ability to lose myself in the drama of a moment; but I still find it strange to be confronted with a narrative only to ignore it, along with the translations flashing above the stage.

There are few plays I have seen as often as La Bohème, sat through the gloom of Rent and the glamour of Baz Luhrman; but, the music aside, I still recall little else beyond an extinguished candle and a distinct cough.  Not that I believe comedian Ed Wynn to be a reliable translator in matters operatic. Wynn, whom I previously consulted on Carmen, once tried to tell the story of La Boheme (or “La Bum,” as he called it) to tenor James Melton (pictured above), on whose radio program he was featured in the mid-1940s.

It was on the 10 March 1946 broadcast of The James Melton Show that Wynn introduced listeners to Mimi, who, preparing for a ball, had just put on her bustle and was “rearing to go.” In Wynn’s version, Mimi had been named “Miss Soft Drink of the Year” because she was “interested in any guy from seven up.” He had nothing to say about flirtatious Musetta, who had such terrible puns coming.

Now, Mimi lives in the same boarding house as Rodolfo, you see.  One day, she hears the pot, the poet [. . .] reciting.  He says: “There is an old lady who lives in a shoe.”  And Mimi says, “Well, she’s pretty lucky, the way that the room situation is.”

Not Rent-controlled, apparently. Such references to the housing crisis of the mid-1940s pop up frequently in radio entertainment, from Fred Allen to Hercule Poirot (who, as I discussed here, inexplicably relocated to the US and found himself without a flat).

The synopsis is mercifully interrupted by a few notes from the opera, sung by Annamary Dickey.  It is the kind of highhatting of the uplift that was so common an approach to the so-called high arts in the middlebrow medium of 1930s and 1940s radio. It is the working-class re-vision and consequent rejection of culture as imposition, of art as irrelevance, a way of looking without seeing to which I was conditioned as I grew up, my father being hostile toward anything that smacked of the “high classical,” a self-imposed exclusion from the beautiful, transporting and inspiring that expressed itself in crude mockery.

Fortunately, I don’t need to draw on the jovial if misfiring old Fire Chief to enlighten me. The Mid-Wales Opera’s La Bohème is “cenir mewn Saesneg,” which is to say, sung in English. For once I can just face the music, rather than being confronted with my own ignorance . . .

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The King of Clubs

Well, I wonder now. About that golf ball, I mean. Earlier this week, I went on a tour of St. Donats, the Welsh castle that, during the 1920s and ’30s, was being transformed into a getaway for media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, silent screen and talkies star Marion Davies. A decade after Hearst’s death in 1951, his trustees finally managed to sell this fourteenth-century if thoroughly remodeled castle, something that Hearst had been trying to do since his empire began to crumble in the late 1930s. In 1962, St. Donats became the site of the international Atlantic College and as such no tourist attraction; but, as I mentioned previously, every August and early September, when most of its students are away, it is open to visitors.

Our tour was conducted by one of the students, a girl from New Mexico, who, however charming, smart, and fortunate to land a scholarship to attend this prestigious school, had little to do with or say about the castle and its history, other than sharing a few anecdotes about a ghost, a pirate, and a deadly duel, all part of St. Donats fascinating lore.

However much remains of the old place, its more recent past is now obscured, a fleeting Hollywood romance yielding both to antiquity and utility. Since the castle is now a campus, little is left of its imposed splendor designed to impose, architectural features imported from all over Britain and Europe by Hearst, who had done as much on an even grander scale at San Simeon in California. Assembled from various secular and profane properties, the (pictured) banqueting hall with its English church roof and its fireplace from France, was commissioned by Hearst to accommodate his illustrious guests, however rarely he ultimately got to entertain at St. Donats.

Waiting for our tour to commence, we found a golf ball in a little herb garden on the grounds. I thought little of it at the time; but when I browsed through Enfys McMurry’s slyly titled Hearst’s Other Castle (1999) to satisfy my newly roused curiosity about St. Donats, I came across a reference to . . . Big Broadcast star, USO morale booster, and golf enthusiast Bob Hope.

As those who know me come to dread, I can ride the hobbyhorse of old-time radio to death; but I didn’t expect to drag it back from its pasture quite that quickly in this case, notwithstanding Hearst’s media empire and Davies’s appearances on the Lux Radio Theater. As it turns out, the quintessential radio comedian of the medium’s so-called golden age was indeed staying at St. Donats shortly before Hearst’s death in 1951. Hearst had not been at St. Donats in over a decade; and Hope, of Welsh descent on his mother’s side, was the last major Tinseltownie to occupy this ancient castle. He was in need of a place to flop while attending a golf tournament in the Welsh town of Porthcawl during the spring of that year.

Now, I don’t suppose Bob “Thanks for the Memory” Hope could have planted that ball there among the lavender and fennel, the herb garden being a recent addition; but those moats and towers sure inspire yarns . . .

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The Bourne Imperative

Well, I’m not sure whether I could stomach Lorna Luft and Dallas alumnus Ken Kercheval in a touring production of White Christmas; but Matthew Bourne’s Bizet ballet The Car Man was certainly worth a trip to the splendid Canolfan Mileniwm Cymru (Wales Millennium Centre) in Cardiff Bay. Inspired by James M. Cain’s oft-adapted 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (revived on 24 January 1952 on Hollywood Sound Stage, starring radio stalwart Richard Widmark), The Car Man is set in mid-20th century small town America (the fictional Harmony, pop. 375), The Car Man tells the story of the titular drifter who falls for the accommodating wife of his new boss (a vixen named Lana, after the actress who played her in the 1946 film version). Though easily duped, the cuckold is bound to find out, eventually, and to be less than accepting of the triangular situation.

Unlike his whimsical if choreographically frivolous Edward Scissorhands (my impressions of which I shared previously), Bourne’s earlier Car Man is proper dance theater, with an exceptional performance by Michela Meazza as Lana.

While firmly within the tradition of 19th-century melodrama without resorting to camp, The Car Man bears no resemblance to Carmen. Indeed, the story as told in movement, light, and a generous amount of stage blood is far easier to follow than that of Bizet’s opera or the Prosper Mérimée novella upon which it is based, a plot comedian Ed Wynn insisted on translating for the listening audience of Tallulah Bankhead’s radio variety program The Big Show on 26 November 1950, as opera star Lauritz Melchior struggled to perform Pagliacci: “And as the curtain rises, we see Carmen walking out of the cigarette factory. We know it’s a cigarette factory because there are doctors walking in and out of the building.”

Those medical practitioners, of course, were meant to endorse tobacco rather than treat the workers or assess the risks of smoking.

“Carmen has many admirers,” Wynn continued, “and to each one of them she has given a lock of her hair. Isn’t that beautiful? So, Carmen, or as she is now called by her friends, Baldy, [. . .].”

Not that Mr. Wynn could have possibly prepared me for the theatrical experience of The Car Man. In keeping with his celebrated all-male revision of Swan Lake, the old love triangle has been colored pink; or, rather, it is getting another—an outré—angle, as Bourne tosses a male admirer of Lana’s lover into the bloody mix of lust, jealousy, and murder. Being granted views of a communal shower, a private bedroom, and life behind bars—or wherever else you might expect intimate encounters of the same and opposite sex on a sultry evening, Bourne’s audiences can and should expect the full bodyworks.

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My Evening with Queen Victoria

Considering that it is St. George’s Day (as well as the anniversary of the birth of the Bard), I am going to stay a little closer to home this time and, forgoing a return to Budapest, report instead on my audience with the Queen. Victoria Regina, I mean, whom last I captured towering over Birmingham’s German Christmas market (pictured) and imagined listening to her Electrophone. Yesterday, we went to An Evening with Queen Victoria, a one-woman show in which British stage, screen, and television actress Prunella Scales, accompanied by a lyric tenor and a pianist (who is also the husband of the play’s creator and director), has toured the new and old world, including England, Australia, Canada and the United States. So, it was bound to make it to Wales, eventually.

Just in time, I might add. Ms. Scales, whose life now spans as many decades as the play, was called upon to read, in character, selections from the queen’s published reminiscences (Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highland) and personal correspondences, from her youthful comments on her German cousins to her reflections on marriage and motherhood, duty, loss, and old age.

Along the way, the star struggled with some of her lines and had to be prompted audibly at one point (Fawlty Powers, I could not help thinking), while the aged pianist, who at one time loudly cleared his throat as if he had quite forgotten that there was a performance going on, played pieces of classical pieces by Rossini, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, which were interpreted with much feeling by the tenor, who thus painted himself into the queen’s portrait. The three of them joined forces to sing “Duties of a Monarch” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Gondoliers:

Oh, philosophers may sing
Of the troubles of a King,
But of pleasures there are many and of worries there are none;
And the culminating pleasure
That we treasure beyond measure
Is the gratifying feeling that our duty has been done!

The whole royal affair might have faired well on radio, I thought, since it is largely a first-person narrative involving little action, aside from the queen’s efforts to rise from her easy chair to pick up various letters and books, to fetch a cane or wrap herself up as she gradually ages before us. I was not surprised, therefore, to learn that An Evening has indeed been produced for BBC radio.

It was on the air that the Her (Imperial) Majesty had been introduced into the living rooms of America, voiced by Helen Hayes, who inhabited the part on the Broadway stage in Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina (1934), a play initially banned in England for daring to impersonate British royalty yet living.

An Evening was based largely on actual reminiscences of the monarch, as this somewhat unfortunate line from the leaflet that served as a playbill informed me: “The words of this programme are compiled entirely from Queen Victoria’s own journals and letters, together with some additional material from contemporary sources,” which is like saying that a loaf of bread is whole grain, except for a few preservatives and added flavors, natural or otherwise, however difficult to detect.

A similar claim was made by radio announcer Ernest Chapell, who introduced the 2 June 1939 broadcast of Orson Welles’s Campbell Playhouse by declaring that in order to “complete the true picture of this great queen, Mr. Welles has used still another source, one which only a few years ago was still a closed book, locked away in the official archives of the royal family: the personal diary of Queen Victoria.”

Containing the same material and creating a similar effect, An Evening is essentially a non-dramatic version of Victoria Regina, which Hayes revived once again for her Electric Theater on 14 November 1948, the day the queen’s great-great-great grandson, Prince Charles, was born. Intimate without being indiscreet, informal without being vulgar, both sketches create the quiet sensation of familiarity by bringing alive, in her own words, a woman who is more often thought of as an institution or the name crowning an era.

In an age favoring uncompromising exposés and compromising snapshots, close-ups with which we distance ourselves, such personal introductions are a charming and welcome illusion.

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Mining Culture: The Welsh in Hollywood

It was too pleasant an afternoon not to be warming to it. The outdoors, I mean. Though all thumbs (and not one of them green), I nonetheless tried my hands at gardening again, transplanting English-grown Californian Lilac into Welsh soil. Unless deterred by the vagaries of what goes for “vernal” here in Wales, I shall probably spend more time tending to the plants than to this journal next week, when the storm-frayed and patched-up telephone lines to our house are scheduled to be cut down and replaced, a spring renewal of telecommunications during which service is likely to be suspended.

No internet, no landline, and no traffic along the already quiet lane leading to this hermitage I call home—it’s “a proper place for a murder.” That is how the setting of Night Must Fall was described when on this day, 27 March, in 1948, the famous and oft revived thriller by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams was performed on the US radio thriller anthology Suspense.

Along with two members of the original (1935) London cast—Dame May Whitty (as Mrs. Bramson) and Matthew Boulton (as the inspector)—Robert Montgomery was heard in the role of Dan, the lady killer he had played in the 1937 film adaptation. As I realized after seeing it on stage, Night Must Fall is not your common crop of a crime melodrama. It goes beyond the question of whether or not the victim will die by asking us whether she ought to, by making us eager for the “must” of her demise and examine the decline and “fall” of our own civilized morality. As a psychological and ethical puzzler, it translates well into other languages and media.

Now, Night falls in Essex, England, rather than the wild west of Britain; but according to Williams’s stage directions, the character of “Baby-face” Dan “speaks with a rough accent” that, unlike Montgomery’s, is “more Welsh than anything else.” On Broadway as on the London stage, this “sort of Welsh” Dan (as his girlfriend describes him) was voiced by the very Welshman who created him.

In an acting career spanning six decades, Williams was a frequent player in (mainly British) film, on stage and television; on US radio, he was heard in one of Norman Corwin’s plays for the United Nations. I recently spotted him in The Citadel (1938), his voice lending authenticity to the depiction of life in a Welsh mining town rendered unconvincing by the casting of Hollywood productions like John Ford’s Academy Award-winning How Green Was My Valley (another cinema classic I caught up with this year) or The Corn Is Green. The latter is based on an autobiographical play by Williams; but with stars like Bette Davis (on screen) and Claudette Colbert (on radio, nearly a decade later) taking on the role of a Welsh schoolteacher, it is the audience who is expected to be green.

Having lived in this country for well over two years now, I am all ears for representations and representatives of Wales in popular culture, whether in British cinema or American radio drama. What remains of this country once its landscape, language, and lore are forced through the filter of the camera or microphone, once it is translated by a popular medium like film and transferred to an international audience? During the next few months, leading up to a Welsh film festival hosted by the National Screen and Sound Archive here in Aberystwyth, I am going to mull over such matters from time to time.

To be sure, the landscape and culture of Wales have changed considerably since A. J. Cronyn’s Citadel and Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley were bestsellers in the US back in 1937-38 and 1940, respectively. Prominently featured in 20th-century popular culture (including the previously discussed “Comedy of Danger,” reputedly the first play written for radio), the mines have been shut down years ago and wind farms have replaced collieries. Today, however, the BBC reported that coal mining is making a comeback here, as the first “deep mine” is set to open in over three decades. Could this mean that Ms. Zeta-Jones is going back to her Welsh roots for a Hollywood returns to the Citadel, the Valley or other recycled Corn?